he
other sovereigns mentioned, was claimed as an actual "vassal" of
Chandragupta. They did not even pay tribute, but only a kind of
quit-rent annually for lands ceded in the north: as the grant-tablets
could show. But the inscription, however misinterpreted, shows most
clearly that Alexander was never the conqueror of India.
---------

Occult records show differently. They say--challenging proof to the
contrary--that Alexander never penetrated into India farther than
Taxila; which is not even quite the modern Attock. The murmuring of
the Macedonian's troops began at the same place, and not as given out,
on the banks of the Hyphasis. For having never gone to the Hydaspes or
Jhelum, he could not have been on the Sutlej. Nor did Alexander ever
found satrapies or plant any Greek colonies in the Punjab. The only
colonies he left behind him that the Brahmans ever knew of, amounted to
a few dozens of disabled soldiers, scattered hither and thither on the
frontiers; who with their native raped wives settled around the deserts
of Karmania and Drangaria--the then natural boundaries of India. And
unless history regards as colonists the many thousands of dead men and
those who settled for ever under the hot sands of Gedrosia, there were
no other, save in the fertile imagination of the Greek historians. The
boasted "invasion of India" was confined to the regions between Karmania
and Attock, east and west; and Beloochistan and the Hindu Kush, south
and north: countries which were all India for the Greek of those days.
His building a fleet on the Hydaspes is a fiction; and his "victorious
march through the fighting armies of India," another. However, it is not
with the "world conqueror" that we have now to deal, but rather with the
supposed accuracy and even casual veracity of his captains and
countrymen, whose hazy reminiscences on the testimony of the classical
writers have now been raised to unimpeachable evidence in everything
that may affect the chronology of early Buddhism and India.

Foremost among the evidence of classical writers, that of Flavius
Arrianus is brought forward against the Buddhist and Chinese
chronologies. No one should impeach the personal testimony of this
conscientious author had he been himself an eye-witness instead of
Megasthenes. But when a man comes to know that he wrote his accounts
upon the now lost works of Aristobulus and Ptolemy; and that the latter
described their data from texts p